Collective Lift: How Leaders Get Teams To Obsess Over Customer and Team Success with Dan Gingiss

Most companies say the customer comes first. But in meeting rooms across every industry, business decisions get made every day without a single thought about how they will land on the people paying the bills. Dan Gingiss has spent his career asking one question: what would happen if leaders simply kept the customer in the room? In this episode of Boss Better Now, Joe Mull sits down with Dan Gingiss, a customer experience keynote speaker and author who led digital CX teams at Discover, Humana, and McDonald's. Dan traces his path from Domino's delivery driver to Fortune 500 executive and shares what each step taught him about the irreversible link between how leaders treat their people and how those people treat customers. Dan unpacks why customer experience is not a department but a company-wide discipline, how a manager can build trust with a new team before anyone has earned it, and what he calls "collective lift," the undervalued skill of raising the performance of everyone around you. He also challenges one of the most reflexive assumptions in leadership: that your best individual performer is your best candidate for management. In this episode, you'll learn: 🔹 Why making any business decision with the customer in mind leads to a better outcome, 100 times out of 100. 🔹 What delivering a pizza to Michael Jordan taught Dan about human dignity as a foundational leadership principle. 🔹 What "collective lift" means, and why the employee who makes your whole team better is more valuable than the one who outperforms everyone individually. 🔹 Why the relationship between employee experience and customer experience should be written with an infinity sign, not an equal sign. 🔹 How to start a new leadership role by giving your team full trust on day one, before anyone has done a thing to earn it.To subscribe to Joe Mull’s BossBetter Email newsletter, visit https://BossBetterNow.com For more info on working with Joe Mull, visit https://joemull.com For more info on Boss Hero School, visit https://bossheroschool.com To email the podcast, use [email protected] #leadership #management #toxicworkculture #teambuilding #workplaceculture #conflictmanagement #employeeengagement #motivation Joe Mull is on a mission to help leaders and business owners create the conditions where commitment takes root and the entire workplace thrives. A dynamic and deeply relatable speaker, Joe combines compelling research, magnetic storytelling, and practical strategies to show exactly how to cultivate loyalty, ignite effort, and build people-first workplaces where both performance and morale flourish. His message is clear: when commitment is activated, engagement rises, teams gel, retention improves, and business outcomes soar. Joe is the founder of Boss Hero School™ and the creator of the acclaimed Employalty™ framework, a roadmap for creating thriving workplaces in a new era of work. He’s the author of three books, including Employalty, named a top business book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, and his popular podcast, Boss Better Now, ranks in the top 1% of management shows globally. A former head of learning and development at one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., Joe has spent nearly two decades equipping leaders—from Fortune 500 companies like State Farm, Siemens, and Choice Hotels to hospitals, agencies, and small firms—with the tools to lead better, inspire commitment, and build more humane workplace cultures. His insights have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and more. In 2025, Joe was inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame (CPAE). This is the speaking profession’s highest honor, a distinction granted to less than 1% of professional speakers worldwide. It’s awarded to speakers who demonstrate exceptional talent, integrity, and influence in the speaking profession For more information visit joemull.com. Timestamps: 0:00 Episode Preview 0:31 Welcome Dan Gingiss 3:22 Delivering Pizza to Michael Jordan 5:00 Early Jobs and Becoming the “Cruise Director” at Work 6:15 First-Time Manager Lessons 10:00 Leading With Trust From Day One 13:23 The Career Pivot Into Digital Customer Experience 15:00 Discovering the Power of Small CX Changes 20:00 Happy Employees, Happy Customers 22:55 "How Does This Impact Our Customers?” 25:00 Become a Customer of Your Own Company 27:16 People Leadership as a Superpower 30:00 Defining and Measuring Collective Lift 33:32 Why the Best Salesperson Shouldn’t Always Be the Manager 34:25 The Most Absurd Workplace Rule 35:00 The One Phrase That Should Be Banned Forever 35:18 Career Advice That Still Matters 36:28 Closing Thoughts